Cybernetics takes the idea of using sensing and feedback to control andoptimize performance and extends it to the universe in general.

New Cybernetics or second-order cybernetics is the cybernetics of cybernetics.It investigates the construction of models of cybernetic systems looking beyond the issues of the first original cybernetics and their politics and sciences of control, that the investigators are also part of the system, and of the importance of autonomy, self-consistency, self-referentiality, and self-organizing capabilities of complex systems. Investigators of a system can never see how it works by standing outside it because the investigators are always engaged cybernetically with the system being observed; that is, when investigators observe a system, necessarily they affect it and are affected by it.

The scope and impact of control systems could be substantially increased with the incorporation of properties we usually associate with cognition, such as reasoning, planning, and learning.